That’s me, all right, always dreaming!
Waaaaay back in the far-gone days of the late 1990s and early 2000s I was involved in a project to build a distributed object-based system for a small (to remain nameless) Queensland business. We built it, schlepped it around, set up a demo/trial testbed and got a fair bit of interest. We even made the first steps to getting a patent (I have no idea what happened to that). Somehow however, it didn’t quite take off and anyway the bubble and social phenomenon that was The Internet burst and so interest quickly evaporated.
All that work :-(
Such is life!
Getting a testbed up and running was (ahem) ‘interesting’: we had to buy a dedicated server and round up an old box to act as a firewall, arrange for a tame organisation to host them for us (one of our backers helped us out there…), configure the pair appropriately, get the darned kit on the ‘net (easy to say but this was the time of the 33.6Kbps modem, remember; those things were not known for their reliability), and so on. Not the easiest thing to do and definitely not core to what we wanted to be doing.
Things are so much easier these days. Why, back in my day, we….
I have just had a play with http://www.stax.net. This gives a glimpse of Platform As A Service.
According to TechCrunch, Stax is:
…built on top of Amazon EC2 and allows developers to create, text and deploy Java applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure.
For now Stax isn’t charging users at all. Eventually they’ll move to a model that charges for resources uses, similar to EC2 and other infrastructure platforms.
At the moment, Stax is in beta test and one has to sign up to get an “invitation code” so that the stax guys can control demand appropriately. I got my code within a few days of making my application.
There are other similar facilities such as Morph AppSpace for Java; the buzz is that this is more mature so I may give this a burl later on.
Stax is based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2):
Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.
In what is pretty much the simplest possible test, I downloaded the Stax SDK, took my earlier Pokie/Drools example and uploaded it to Stax.
Since grails is not officially supported quite yet, I followed the instructions here.
It worked! Right out of the box! Take a look at the URL…
There is a rudimentary console that lets you control your application, invite new development team members, etc.. Nothing special but it gets the job done:
Uploading the application was a bit slow (probably due to my internet connection, rather than anything Stax-related) and the application is pretty simple (no database at all, for instance) but I instantly found myself reminiscing about that earlier project. How much simpler setting up a testbed would have been, how many kilometers of modem-nastiness-related driving I would have saved, how easily I could have demoed new iterations to the client, etc., etc.
Kids these days have got it too easy :-)
